Friday, October 17, 2014

Marissa
Meyer, author of Cinder, has posted
her writing process from idea to finished book.

She
describes in detail such things as outlining, using Scrivener (I still use
Word), how to take criticism from beta readers, and the publisher’s editorial
process. Her first installment is here. Her overall blog is here.

I
met Marissa Meyer last year when she spoke at the Bothell Library. Instead of
simply reading from a manuscript, she regaled us with older versions of fairy
stories, as I described in my blog post.

personal photo

So
if you hear that Marissa Meyer is speaking in your area, be sure to go see her!

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

If
you go to the site for The Score and
page down to the recording of “The Orchestrator” episode, listen
to the first eleven minutes (or click to the third segment and listen to the
first five minutes). It will change your view of movie scores forever. Some of
these great movie composers send a file with the most bare bones of a score to
an orchestrator, and the orchestrator actually fills it out or cuts it back,
then he writes the actual written score composed of notes for all the different
instruments in the orchestra.

image by August Hogn

That
demo the orchestrator was given for “For the First Time” was a joke.

This
rips the mask off of some the supposedly great composers in the business. The
closest comparison is when a movie script is handed to a novelist who works
closely with the movie business, and he proceeds to take a 90 page script and
turn it into a novel of 300+ pages.

I
remember one particular scene where a woman rolled a bicycle out of her room.
The novelist added in the feel of the bicycle, the crumpling sound from some
objects on the floor, and how all this reminded her of her father. At most, I
imagine the movie script would just say she wheeled the bicycle out.

But
this novelization process is open and above board—the writer’s name appears on
the cover of the novelization. But the orchestrators’ names do not appear on
the film scores. In the future, we will look back and see the orchestrators
were the real geniuses.

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Stephen
Hawking is one of the creators of black hole theory using relativistic physics.
(Actually, it would have been possible to come up with a black hole theory
using the old Newtonian physics, but nobody ever bothered to.) Hawking has actually
become quite the celebrity from his work, and he even appeared in an episode of
Star Trek: The Next Generation. He’s
one of the most easily recognized scientists in the world.

A black hole during a total eclipse

Now
Hawking has rethought it and declared black holes do not exist. A standard
feature of science fiction has vanished, as if it had fallen into . . . well,
we’ll think of something. Easy for Hawking to say—sorry I was wrong about what’s
made me famous over the past few decades, next I’ll invent some other
impossible things for you yokels to believe in.